Simon Boas somehow manages to laugh as he talks about picking out his tombstone. He is now at what he calls “the don’t buy any green bananas” stage of dying, “so riddled with cancer that it is comical”.
On Friday, he was still at home, receiving visitors and sending emails, but he moved on Saturday into full-time hospice care. The aid worker, 47, has inspired thousands with a letter he wrote for his local newspaper, the Jersey Evening Post, about his impending death, which is now being turned into a book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dying.
The book will be published in September, but reached No 2 on Amazon last week, beaten only by the Pinch of Nom Air Fryer cookbook.
It is Boas’s humour, honesty, lack of regret and pure joy in life during his final days that have touched readers. “I have had letters and messages from all over the world,” he says. “It’s not just, ‘I’m thinking of you’, but ‘I read this to my father on his deathbed’. Some mourners have read extracts of the letter at funerals; celebrants and priests have asked me about using it. Of course my answer is always yes.” Profits from the book will go to palliative care charities.
Boas, who lives in Trinity, Jersey, with his French wife, Aurelie, was diagnosed with throat cancer in September and told the disease was terminal. “Obviously I would much prefer to have 40 years with my wife and family, but suddenly knowing that I wasn’t going to live very long gives you an astonishing clarity,” he says. “One often says flippantly that one wishes to get hit by a bus and that’s it, but having a period of time to think about life and death, and to come to a degree of acceptance, has been a huge bonus.”
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It has allowed him to have conversations he has never had before, with his parents in particular, but his one major worry is leaving his wife. “It is the thing that will make me cry in the middle of the night if I think too much about it,” he says. “With your parents, it is the wrong order of things, but it’s wrong to leave a widow with 40 years on her own clock. We’ve been so lucky.”
The couple met on a bus at Ben Gurion airport in Israel, fell in love within weeks and have been together for 16 years. “We’re so close — we’re a really annoying couple to everyone else,” he says. “The thought of leaving my family, and what they are going to go through, is just awful. There is no set route for grief. It is always with you and can hit you at random moments. We’re so enjoying this period now — of conversations and drinks — but it’s the finality of it. It’s not like breaking up with someone; there will be no mortal Simon who will ever be there again. That sinking in is terribly difficult.”
He has asked himself what will make it easier. Part of that is “deathmin”: putting his finances in order, choosing the poems and hymns for his funeral and the “fun” of picking out a tombstone. The other part is emotional. “I think they are taking some comfort from the fact that I’m genuinely so cheerful about it all,” he says. “Two weeks ago [doctors] thought I’d be in a hospice by the end of last week, but it turned out that one of my drugs is possibly still working a bit. It forced me to think: ‘Am I ready now?’ And I am. I am accepting, ready and almost curious.”
Throat cancer can be difficult to detect, and when Boas initially sought treatment in the summer of 2022, he was told he had acid reflux. He is free, though, of anger or regret.
“Regret from not doing things, I think, is worse than regret for doing things usually,” he says. “And 47 was a good innings until not long ago for many people, and it still is in many parts of the world. I have been very lucky — not just with my career, taking me to lots of different countries and doing interesting things — but I’ve travelled a lot, seen a lot, experienced a lot. And drunk a lot, smoked a lot and dabbled in all sorts of things.”
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His cancer treatment has robbed him of one of his other great pleasures, cheese, as he is now on a feeding tube, but his oncology team allow him to drink wine and smoke roll-ups.
Boas worked in development in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine and Sierra Leone before becoming executive director of the charity Jersey Overseas Aid. Many of his friends suggested he write about his life as he has so many stories — “not just airstrikes in Gaza, but pretty legendary feats of drinking” — but he did not want to dwell on his experiences. “I find that’s not helpful,” he says. “It is all about the ego, and it’s good to get beyond that, to realise that whatever anyone’s done in life, none of it will particularly be remembered in a few short decades. It’s better not to think about the ‘I did this’; it’s better to think about the world and other people. Everyone makes a difference in their interactions with other people, in the love that they receive and spread.”
He remains an optimist. “We’re terribly gloomy about the world, and sometimes rightly: some people live in really desperate conditions and I don’t want to minimise that,” he says. “But I don’t think the world is going to hell in a hand basket or that Armageddon is around the corner. I was so lucky to see the best in people in the most adverse situations. The world is not Lord of the Flies — people pull together in terrible circumstances. I met people with nothing who were sending their kids off to school in their starched white shirt, and while I’m waiting for my radio [radiotherapy] shot, everyone’s chatting away and the doctors and nurses are so lovely.”
Boas, who was once an atheist but now believes in the possibility of a creator and an afterlife, wants others to stop fearing death too. “Death is not the opposite of life — it is part of life,” he says. “Understanding that enriches life. It is so sad that people fight so hard against it. I am sorry for those billionaires who want to freeze themselves, because it means they are so frightened and uncomprehending of something so natural. We’re here and then we’re not. Understanding that allows you to lead a much fuller life and to be fully human.”
A Beginner’s Guide to Dying will be published by Swift Press on September 12
